


A Handful of Dust

by arbitraryspace



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Mad Science, Suspense, Time Loop, Time War, Timey Wimey Stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-01-29
Updated: 2010-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-06 19:04:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitraryspace/pseuds/arbitraryspace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Millions of Time Lords are trapped beneath the Time Lock.  The Rani's just a little more trapped than most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how the Time War is portrayed in audio canon, so this may veer pretty far from it. Forgive my trespasses, Big Finish fans!

_...:zero:._

Her needle broke skin directly above the young specimen's clavicle, where the inferior aetheric artery tied a constrictor knot around the supra-jugular vena cava. Ordinarily, the tedious task of drawing blood would be left to a junior assistant; but too few of their number had the stomach for this kind of work, and those who still lived were needed elsewhere, on the front timelines. The Rani was as alone as she'd ever been during her exile.

(And thank goodness for that small favor. At least this way the Rani could be certain that her work would not be bungled by frivolous octogenarians.)

The Rani filled her syringe with fresh arterial fluid, and enjoyed the satisfaction of a job well done. She supposed that she found this menial activity calming. Outside the transduction barriers, beyond the concrete walls of her lab, the flow of time roiled and eddied, churned by passing Meanwhiles until it no longer knew its proper course. The Rani's mind could not stop shivering. She was glad of any excuse to concentrate on her hands.

The Rani finished and withdrew, allowing the specimen's skin to heal over. Regeneration was already beginning to set it. The Rani removed the blanket that covered her specimen's shattered legs, and sat down to take notes on the manner in which the flesh knit. She could have amputated the limbs to speed things up, had she been so inclined, but she was a scientist, not a doctor. Coddling these soldiers was not going to advance anyone's knowledge of Gallifreyan biology.

Minutes passed. Blood dried. Bones slid back into place with a squishy squelch-crack. The Rani was considering leaving to check on her other specimens -- most of whom were pacing off their post-regeneration mania -- when the young Time Lady woke with an audible grunt.

Lovely. The child was pushing herself into the corner of the bed. She appeared to be in the early stages of working herself into hysteria. It was a predictable reaction to waking up in a strange laboratory after getting caught in a Dalek raid, and as such, it was nothing that the Rani needed to record. The Rani decided to nip it in the bud before the yelling started.

"Cadet Ataraxia of the Arcalian Fleet, I welcome you to the medical facilities of Miasimia Goria," the Rani said, reading awkwardly from the mental script she'd developed for these situations. All those long, proud centuries of refusing to cultivate a bedside manner were proving problematic, now that her peace of mind depended on keeping wounded youngsters off her back.

"Be assured that you are relatively secure here," the Rani continued. "This complex lies within the allied temporal-spatial territory of the Could-Have-Been King. The crew of your TARDIS dropped you off here after your lower half was crushed by a fallen support beam." She called up the relevant section of the girl's file. "You've been classified as Subject Four-Beta for the purposes of my medical database. I am the Rani. I will be personally supervising your regeneration process."

"They what? They sent me to _the R_-" Subject Four-Beta bit back whatever it was that she'd been about to say. "I mean. Yes. Yes, of course, milady."

The Rani arched an eyebrow. Subject Four-Beta shifted an inch backwards. Perhaps this one possessed some small measure of native intelligence. What a marvel; there was hope for their species yet.

"Initial physical recovery is proceeding as normal. Do you have any ongoing adverse reactions to report? Any physiological outliers I should be aware of?"

"I don't know," Subject Four-Beta said. "I don't know what it's supposed to feel like. I've only read books. This is my first regeneration."

Subject Four-Beta ran bony fingers through her thin, silvering hair. Hm. That must be a nervous compulsion of some sort. Hardly efficient behavior for a TARDIS pilot. Something ought to be done.

The young woman hugged her arms to her chest, and looked the Rani square in the eye. She had mustered every scrap of her courage in an attempt to keep from collapsing. It made her seem fragile, and a little pathetic.

"Will it hurt, Lady Rani?"

The Rani planted her hands on her hips. "Don't be melodramatic, Subject Four-Beta. There is no reason for the process to hurt, so long as you don't botch things up. I'm only here to keep an eye out for egregious incompetence on the part of undergraduates."

"Understood." Subject Four-Beta slid her gaze to the floor. "If the crew of my TARDIS is here, then I'd- um- I'd like to speak with Captain Pyrrho. Before I change."

"The Lord President has decreed that TARDISes must not stay docked here." Not since that weasel of a Master buggered off to parts unknown. "Your captain will be back to pick you up in forty-eight hours, present subjective time, when your new regeneration has settled."

"Ah."

The Rani drew another blood sample and set the lab's surveillance systems to notify her once Subject Four-Beta's artron saturation reached gold critical. The regeneration proceeded without incident and, in a matter of moments, the pale and nervous specimen was replaced by a rotund woman with a healthy flush. Subject Four-Beta immediately started scrawling explicit love letters to her commanding officer all over the walls. The Rani took advantage of Subject Four-Beta's distraction to conduct a discreet mental probe of her hormone-addled psyche.

Twenty minutes after the Rani finished her case notes, the building exploded.

+++

_...:cycle one:._

Like any good researcher, the Rani was accustomed to gathering facts and distilling them into reasonable hypotheses. She'd done it in the ivory towers of academia. She'd done it in the squalid depths of exile. She'd done it since the day she was born; the day they brought her before the Untempered Schism, and showed her the impossible dimensions of life, and set her mind to grasping so desperately for an explanation that it had never, ever stopped. A little thing like getting killed in an explosion was hardly enough to turn her from reason at this point. It wasn't as though this was her first experience with agonizing death.

So. Facts.

The Rani had felt her lungs sear to cinders from the inside-out.

The Rani was now sitting at her data entry console, in spite of the aforementioned searing.

The Rani's skin remained a rich mahogany, scored into numbness by the scars of her great failure, and when she checked her reflection in the console screen, she could see that her nose retained its prominent hook.

Given those facts, the Rani felt confident in hypothesizing that she'd been caught by some sort of temporal recurrence loop. She'd died and returned to life without undergoing regeneration. What other explanation could there be? If this were a hallucination, or a construct her biodata had conjured to keep her sane within the Matrix, then surely her heartsbeat would not have sped into a compound meter, and she would not be suffering the weight of nausea in her belly. The Rani understood the physical cues relating to emotional distress, right down to their individual triggering neurons. She would not wish such inconvenient reactions upon herself.

The Rani's fingertips skittered unsteadily across the across the data entry board, searching for the diagnostic systems. Muscle-memory served her well, and soon enough, she was staring at a diagram of the laboratory's transduction barriers. Nothing in the readings struck the Rani as out-of-the-ordinary. A few power spikes showed here and there, commensurate with great temporal stress, but for the moment, her defences were holding as steady as ever. It should take the better part of a billion years to wear away the boundaries of her compound.

As the Time War dragged on, the Rani had come to depend on the notion that death was her only way out of this prison. Now she was denied even that grim certainty.

The Rani moved her hand to the door frame to steady herself. Hysterical laughter was not helping. Hysterical laughter was not helping _at all_, and she ought to push it down, close it off, translate it into harsh words for her specimens. Only there wasn't really a point, was there? Damnable recurrence loop. The whole of space-time was falling into anarchy, but it only made her cage that much stronger, and--

The Rani was rescued from her descent into panic by the hollow, insistent noise that wheezed in from the hallway.

Her work. Yes, there was work to be done. A TARDIS was arriving.

The Rani stood and took a pair of deep breaths. Then she squared her shoulders, tied her hair back, and strode off to the landing foyer. TARDISes weren't the only creatures that took care to announce their entrance; her boot-heels beat a regimental march against the smooth tiled floor.

Alas, ill fortune was not yet done with the Rani, and she was disappointed to find that none of her visitors had disembarked early enough to be properly intimidated by her approach. The ship growing out of the Rani's flooring wore the form of a brushed-steel coat stand. A pair of fresh red laboratory robes draped were on the upper pegs.

"Well?" She snapped at the furniture. "Get on with it. I don't know where you think you are, but I'm not going to brew tea and fetch biscuits."

Nothing like a good annoyance to help her center herself. Attend to the angry scientist, children, and pay no mind to the sweat pooled at the nape of her neck.

The Rani knew from previous experience that watching the TARDIS' doors open would be disorienting, but she did so anyway. The crisp gold hems of the laboratory robes floated up and out, extending into fourth-dimensional geometries, until a bright portal resolved itself between their asymmetric folds. A dashing young officer stood silhouetted in the threshold. His subordinates, flanking, had their energy weapons raised and pointed at her head.

"Captain."

"Milady." The boy saluted -- a human affectation, which had come into fashion after the Doctor joined the ranks of command. "Captain Pyrrho, Second Wing of the Arcalian Fleet. We're here from the Merkava front. I have a patient for you."

Well, _obviously_.

"I would presume so," the Rani said. She wheeled a gurney over, from its resting-place near the south wall. "Do you feel anything odd, Captain? A misalignment of your instincts? A disturbance in your seventh sense?"

"I-- No?" Captain Pyrrho blinked, taken aback. He stepped out of his TARDIS -- my, my, breaking regulations already! what _were_ Academy standards coming to -- to stiffly inspect the gurney's stability. It gave him an excuse to lean in close to her, and lower his voice. "How did you know, Lady Rani? Am I that easy to read?" The Rani took that to be a rhetorical question. "Don't tell the cadets I said so, but I think the thing that attacked might not have been Dalek in origin."

"Our ally, His Concurrent Majesty?"

"I can't say. It's hard to keep hold of my thoughts, out here." Captain Pyrrho cleared his throat, then stepped back and away. "What I wouldn't give to be behind a transduction barrier like you are. We can barely keep our ship upright with space-time in this state."

The Rani nodded. Another fact for her collection: not all of the Time Lords caught in this recurrence loop were aware of what was happening. Indeed, it was quite possible that the Rani, shielded and sheltered, was the only one whose senses were still sharp enough to pick up on the problem.

Fat lot of good that did her.

A keening sort of noise rattled out from the depths of the TARDIS. Captain Pyrrho affected a constipated look that might have been noble concern. The Rani's hearts settled in her chest, and cold purpose overcame her fevered thoughts.

Yes, of course. The good it did her. She should have realized. What did it matter if this prison was likely to become her grave? She had this one research subject, for as many trials as she liked, and no council oversight to stop her.

Oh, the things the Rani could _learn_.

The Rani tightened her grip on the gurney's metal handles.

"Give her to me," she said.

Captain Pyrrho had the nerve to puff up his chest. As though this were a good time to show off for his little friends! Hah. Nobility was not among the native instincts of their species. This Captain Pyrrho was as scared and lost as the rest of them, compensating for his lack of spine with a giant starched collar. "This isn't really a field hospice, is it? It can't be. I'm not stupid. With all due respect, your reputation _does_ precede you, Lady Rani. There's no reason to drop Cadet Ataraxia off here. She'd be fine if we kept her on board, and put her in our zero room."

The Rani balled her hands into fists, testing the sharpness of her manicure against the fleshy parts of her palms.

"Give her to me," the Rani repeated. "You have your orders from the High Council."

"My Lord Doctor has told his subordinates in the Prydonian Fleet that they should make excuses not to drop personnel here."

"I've been informed." By Captain Pyrrho himself, during their first encounter. Not that the Rani hadn't already deduced as much.

"Cadet Ataraxia is a good subordinate. If you-"

Oh, for fuck's sake. The Rani advanced on Captain Pyrrho until he'd retreated all the way back into his TARDIS. She didn't touch him. She didn't have to. Stupid, sniveling, idiot boy, who still thought that the breath of a renegade could poison him, and that an elder's disapproval might very well stop his hearts. If he'd had any real intention of opposing her, then he wouldn't have told her his sorry little doubts.

"You are _dismissed_, Captain!"

The TARDIS crew accepted the Rani's gurney, and loaded Subject Four-Beta onto it without complaint. She ought to have shouted instructions, she supposed, but her mind was already elsewhere, plotting a preliminary testing regimen.

She'd already failed once, and that was once too often. It wasn't going to happen again.

+++

_...:cycle nineteen:._

The Rani held a mug of hot Orion chai in both her hands. She didn't dare drink it -- the beverage was as viscous as motor-oil, and highly toxic to artron-based life-forms -- but that didn't mean she couldn't enjoy its vapours. Its acid-slick smell burned the fog away from her senses, and choked the area of her brain that controlled fatigue into a temporary shut-down.

Ah, sweet clarity. This was the last half-litre of Orion chai in the galaxy. It was even better than the last time she'd brewed it, nine hours previous. The Rani's quality of life had markedly improved since the onset of the recurrence loop. There was a routine now, and an experimental process. All extraneous specimens were locked up and out of her way. Turbulence in the outside world was no longer relevant. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

The Rani had a place of her own, naturally, so she set down the chai, and walked over to Subject Four-Beta's side. When she saw the girl's lashes flutter, she slid into her usual greeting without preamble.

"Cadet Ataraxia of the Arcalian Fleet, I welcome you to the medical facilities of Miasimia Goria. Be assured that you are relatively secure here. This complex lies within the allied temporal-spatial territory of the Could-Have-Been King."

The Rani made a show of scribbling on her data-pad. There was no need to started a file, since all records created within the recurrence loop were unmade when time re-set itself, but she didn't need Subject Four-Beta catching onto that. Introducing a new psychological irritant would compromise the Rani's results for this cycle.

"The crew of your TARDIS dropped you off here after your lower half was crushed by a fallen support beam," the Rani continued. You've been classified as Subject Four-Beta for the purposes of my medical database. I am the Rani. I will be personally supervising your regeneration process."

"They what? They sent me to _the R_-" Subject Four-Beta swallowed. "I mean. Yes. Yes, of course, milady." Her gaze slid to her left wrist. "M- may I inquire as to why I am still strapped down?"

"You may, but I won't answer."

The Rani moved to the head of the bed, and placed her fingertips on Subject Four-Beta's temples. Her nails pressed little half-moons into the skin above the girl's eyebrows.

"But-" Subject Four-Beta tugged at her bonds.

"Hush," the Rani said. The smile on her face was genuine, which was probably why the Subject started shaking. "You're afraid to regenerate, aren't you? There's nothing to worry about. I'll be with you the entire time."

And with that, she sunk her talons deep into the young Time Lady's mind. Past the gauzy outer film of surface memory -- the smell of fresh grass, the weight Captain Pyrrho's hand on her shoulder, raw lightning striking her down and then oh lords oh lords the pain her legs -- towards the well of possibilities at her core.

Tsk. So much screaming. The Rani had never been good at understanding other people and their tedious emotional hang-ups. She made a mental note to use a gag next time. She grew weary of all this gibbering on about skulls.


	2. Chapter 2

_...:cycle thirty-seven_

Common Gallifreyan wisdom held that dying got easier with age.

The first time was awkward, like losing one's virginity; a messy, unpleasant experience, equal parts embarrassing noises and telepathic fumbling, which culminated in a disappointing climax. Naturally the second time was even worse. It was usually pre-planned, and filled with all sorts of unrealistic expectations about the amazingly fashionable person one was going to become, now that one was ready to _innovate_ instead of grimly clutching the sheets. The resultant personalities were almost universally insufferable.

But by the third time, one was expected to face death with a modicum of grace, and settle on an iconic body type in the same way one might invest in developing a tasteful fetish. From thereon in things were meant to proceed in a relatively straightforward fashion. Common Gallifreyan wisdom wouldn't stand for persistent outliers.

As far as the Rani was concerned, common Gallifreyan wisdom was a huge load of rubbish.

Death was never easy. It was a process of personal evolution. If an incarnation was killed -- voluntarily, or otherwise -- that meant it had a weakness which needed to be compensated for and corrected. As one grew older the possibilities grew fewer and the failures piled up, until one realized that one would never achieve the peak of one's potential, because social and environmental factors worked to pollute the will and skew each incarnation towards debilitating personality flaws. There was nothing simple or comforting about it.

So the Rani could -- _in theory_ \-- understand why someone might blow a bad regeneration entirely out of proportion.

"Who did take from me?" Subject Four-Beta bellowed. "What did you _do_?!"

The newly-ginger Time Lady wrenched an IV-stand off its moorings and twirled it around like a makeshift staff, swinging wildly in the Rani's direction. The Rani dropped into a crouch just in time to keep the metal pole from smashing her skull open like an over-ripe melon. Instead the IV-stand slammed into her counter space, destroying her coffee still and scattering surgical instruments all over the floor.

"For pity's sake, get ahold of yourself!" The Rani barked. "I used psychic selection to bring out all the best possibilities within you. You should feel better than you've ever been."

She dove to grab her electromagnetic scalpel. Subject Four-Beta slammed her IV-stand into the space where the Rani had been standing.

"I don't love him anymore." Oh, for the love of Pythia. That was a whimper. A _whimper_. Was Subject Four-Beta _crying_? "How can I not love him? Who am I, if I can't love him?"

She stood, forlorn, in a patch of shattered floor tiles. Her shoulders were shaking. Definitely crying, then.

The Rani flicked her scalpel to setting fourty-four.

"That's it? That's _all_? That's as juvenile as-- oh, never mind," the Rani said. "I know everything you are and all that you could be. So I hope you will note my sincerity when I say that I am _very_ disappointed in you."

The Rani made a slashing motion, and Subject Four-Beta screamed and screamed and screamed, as her skin exploded into a riot of shallow cuts. The Rani squinted to keep fresh blood from splashing in her eyes.

Subject Four-Beta's body gave one last defiant gurgle, and then fell limply to the floor. The Rani stood back up and straightened her skirts. Looking at the raw, red meat made her disgusted with herself. She should have kept the girl's skull and torso intact; should have immobilized her, and stripped her psyche down until she found an anomaly. Killing Subject Four-Beta was a complete waste. It wasn't like the Rani to be so impulsive.

The Rani nudged Subject Four-Beta's corpse with the toe of her boot, and quashed the urge to step on what was left of her face. She was not that petulant.

Subject Four-Beta's bravery could be fearsome instead of pathetic. Her (frankly pedestrian) intellect could be bolstered by diligence and good sense. She could become _so much greater_ than what she was. But no matter what the Rani did to make this foolish child the best she could be, it all went to shit five minutes after her body re-formed, and it was just so--

The Rani was just so--

Ugh.

The Rani threw up her hands with exasperation and stalked out of the room.

Next time, she would mould her specimen towards obedience rather than combat aggression.

+++

_...:cycle fifty-nine:._

The Rani walked the length of her main hallway, careful to maintain a consistent stride. Eight hundred and ninety-three steps until Subject Four-Beta's regeneration process reached gold critical. Nine-hundred and fifty-six steps until Subject Four-Beta awake from her post-regeneration stupor and could be evaluated for mental stability. One thousand, three hundred and twenty-three steps until the Rani died again, with a roar-flash-bang, and touched a slim second of nothingness, before being jerked back to life without reaching any sort of resolution.

But the Rani must not allow her frustration to distract her; not when she was tasked with juggling the variables that kept this world intact. Fifty-nine sets of trial data. Fourteen postulated bio-artronic energy transfer equations. Three pan-dimensional mathematical proofs-in-progress. None of it recorded. All in her head. She needed quiet and structure, rhythm and rote.

Step, and step, and step, until she was standing in front of the first of five lead doors, sealed shut with heavy electro-magnetic bolts. Time to temporarily suspend the count. Allotted span for inquiry: twenty steps, no stumbles.

The Rani ran a quick algorithm to test the strength of the lock, and found it secure. Then she turned her attention to the specimen housed within. He was a broad, heavily-muscled man, bursting at the seams of his robes like a primate shot up with steroids. He kept circling the walls of his enclosure and making abortive attempts at physical exercise.

Something in him sharpened, when he sensed the Rani's approach, and he contorted his frame into a shuffling sort of crab-walk.

"Lemme out," the subject croaked, slamming up against the door.

"I won't do that."

"Lemme out." His fingernails scrambled uselessly at solid metal. "Please, I want it to stop."

Like her, this Time Lord was aware of the recurrence loop, because his mental awareness was preserved by the transduction barrier. _Unlike_ her, he was stark raving mad. The recurrence loop would not allow his body to exit its state of post-regeneration mania. The Rani did not need telepathy to know that his mind had snapped several cycles ago.

"Euthanasia isn't a option in these circumstances," the Rani said, without thinking. "Assisted suicide is futile in a recurrence loop. If it's any consolation, you were broken before this problem took effect. You died on the battlefield; research shows that Time Lords who regenerate under traumatic circumstances are plagued by a whole host of psychological problems that snowball over the course of their subsequent lives." She shook her head. "I'm making progress in that area, but it was always too late for me to fix you."

"But it is returning!" The subject cried out. "Returning like death, which is _always_ returning, returning, returning and turning us."

Nineteen steps, and twenty. There. Why did she bother with these inane one-sided conversations? Since when had she been inclined to share her results with lowly specimens?

The Rani ignored her discarded subject's gibbering, and walked off to continue her rounds.

+++

_...:cycle sixty-six:_

Subject Four-Beta shook like a leaf, hugging her knees to her sagging chest. The Rani found herself irrationally annoyed by the reaction. It was only instinctive. She _knew_ that. And yet. Her efforts to promote the specimen's psychological stability were becoming increasingly futile. Psychic surgery hadn't worked, and apparently, neither would loosening Subject Four-Beta's bonds like a good little doctor.

But this inane trial wasn't over yet.

The Rani slipped her left hand into her pocket, and worried the handle of her electromagnetic scalpel.

"Cadet Ataraxia of the Arcalian Fleet, I welcome you to the medical facilities of Miasimia Goria." She slid into the words, shrugging on the shape of a concerned do-gooder. "Be assured that you are relatively secure here. This complex lies within the allied temporal-spatial territory of the Could-Have-Been King. The crew of your TARDIS dropped you off here after your lower half was crushed by a fallen support beam."

The Rani smiled so broadly that her teeth showed. "You've been classified as Subject Four-Beta for the purposes of my medical database. I am the Rani. I will be personally supervising your regeneration process."

"They what?" Subject Four-Beta stared at her. "They sent me to _the R_-" She bit back whatever it was that she'd been about to say. "I mean. Yes. Yes, of course, mi-"

"No, go on. Say it."

"Milady?"

"They what?? Oh, my. They sent me to _the Rani_," the Rani said, in an exagerrated drawl. She cleared her throat, and reached out to give the girl's shoulder an awkward pat. "Come now. What have your peers been telling you? I'm not under any illusions about being as infamous as my old schoolmates."

"Um." Subject Four-Beta thinned her lips into a straight line. "W- well, Captain Pyrrho says that you're a biologist, so maybe you're making some... anti-Daleks? That would be... interesting."

"Hmph. It most certainly would _not_." The Rani crossed her arms. "Do you know how many servant species I've engineered since I left Gallifrey? Hundreds. I have engineered _hundreds_ of servant species. Every one of them more healthy and viable than anything that armor-obsessed hack Davros could come up with."

"Okay?"

"Right, so. I'm glad we've bonded, now that I've shown empathy for your position." Bothering to inquire as to her opinion was empathetic, wasn't it? Yes, of course it was. It was hardly the Rani's fault that Subject Four-Beta's answer had been excessively slow-witted. "You wouldn't feel like unburdening yourself to me before your regeneration, would you? Nice clean slate? Good? Yes?"

The Rani reached out to pat Subject Four-Beta on the shoulder. Subject Four-Beta didn't start screaming, and only shivered a little, so the Rani decided that her strategy was a successful one. It reminded her of dealing with her own long-ago children, before she'd (thankfully) been allowed to pack them off to the Academy.

Subject Four-Beta looked up through her lashes. "Well," she said, "if I may ask... why do you have fiberoptic cable wound around your neck?"

"I'm being whimsical," the Rani informed her.

"You are?"

"That's what I just said."

"Ah."

The silence stretched out until it was fit to snap, and the Rani realized, to her own mild surprise, that her hand had not left its place near Subject Four-Beta's collarbone. It was hard to make out textures through her scars, but she still should have maintained awareness of the girl's body temperature. Time moved forward -- step, step, step -- and her observational skills were breaking down.

"Will it hurt, Lady Rani?" Subject Four-Beta finally said. "Captain Pyrrho said it didn't hurt, when he regenerated, and of course I believe him, but he's so very strong! Stronger than me, certainly, and even he's only done it the once." She swallowed. "I didn't ask my parents while they were still alive."

It occurred to the Rani that she must be the most senior Time Lady this girl had encountered in some time. All those comfortable traditionalists hadn't been able to adapt to the battlefield, and the Lord President had little use for their tedious checks and balances. The only Gallifreyans fit for a Time War were the young and malleable, and the old and terrifying.

"Living hurts, Subject Four-Beta," the Rani said, moved by an instinct she didn't care to classify. "Pain teaches us our limits. That's the reason why it's illegal to engineer infants without the appropriate neural receptors." She squeezed the girl's shoulder, then removed her hand. "If an infant can cope with pain, then you can cope as well."

But of course, the girl didn't.

+++

_...:cycle sixty-seven:_

The Rani opened her eyes and immediately flinched back from the console, squinting to filter out the harsh light of her datascreen. She'd died again. That much was obvious. Each time she emerged on the other side of the pain the world felt a little bit sharper, a little more raw. Some time soon she'd cut herself on the edge of a desk, or fumble with her favourite scalpel, and all the precious test data in her brain would bleed out as psychic static, and where would she be then?

Back to the bloody beginning again. Recurrence within recurrence.

She set her fingertips on the console keypad and readied herself to begin the first of her memory exercises. Only she was laughing, a little, under her breath, and that wouldn't do for the exercise at all. Her robes felt itchy. Sweat pooled at the back of her neck. And it was no wonder she felt dirty, she'd sunk so low as to _impersonate the Doctor_, and it still hadn't worked, which made her really wonder what that fool thought he was doing carting all those primates around for his own experiments. If 'empathy' couldn't stabilize a Time Lady then the Rani had a hard time seeing how it was supposed to psychologically upgrade a barely-sentient ape.

"He always did confuse pseudo-science and performance art," the Rani said, and laughed again, until she caught sight of her face reflected in the screen. The expression she saw there put a swift end to her hysterics.

"No." She stood. "No, no, no -- absolutely _not_. I know the signs. I shan't be doing this."

No more tittering. No more talking to herself. The recurrence loop made certain that her body was refreshed at regular intervals, but she, of all people, should be cognizant of the psychological necessity of sleep.

No time to flee to her quarters. The Rani picked up her remaining sachet of Orion tea, and threw it in the incinerator tube. Then she removed her overcloak and set it on a chair. The task of disrobing continued, and she was halfway through the arduous process of unlacing her snakeskin corset, when when she heard the telltale wheeze of Captain Pyrrho's TARDIS.

The Rani shut the door, programmed the deadbolts locked, and resumed the business of getting ready for bed. It took the vaunted Captain a whole five minutes charge out of his TARDIS like an idiot and start making a racket in her halls. She could make out a quartet of male voices babbling and calling her name.

For a moment, the Rani considered ignoring them until they went away. Then she remembered that the soldiers were liable to run across her containment cells and get _ideas_. It was extremely unlikely that any of them would be able to break the Rani's locking encryption, but even so, she could do without their moral outrage getting in the way of her nine-hour nap.

The Rani walked over to her console and pressed the intercom button.

"Captain Pyrrho of the Arcalian Fleet: be advised that I am in no mood for visitors. If you do not leave now, I will gas you. _Good night_."

Captain Pyrrho's scouting team stopped calling her name and started babbling at each other and oh dear, she was smiling again, very much in spite of herself. Skipping her memory exercises should not feel like, like-- like skipping cybersociology to go collect poisonous moss from the Cardinal's garden. But the Rani would not giggle like a schoolgirl. She would _not_.

The Rani set about constructing a makeshift sleeping-bag from various cushions and articles of clothing. She was halfway through fashioning a pillow out her blouse when she was interrupted by an insistent knocking sound -- tap-tap-tap-tap -- that set her teeth on edge.

"I believe I mentioned gas?"

"I believe you did," a male voice said. "That must be why you sound so cheery! I _love_ gas. There's no end to the fun."

Marvellous. More adolescents.

The Rani decided to teach her glib new visitor a lesson about scathing remarks.

"Oh my, yes, you've got me. This laboratory is like a party that never stops. Space-time is collapsing, and we're all going to go mad before we cease to exist. What's not to be jovial about?"

"That's the old Rani spirit! If life gives you lemons, eat them raw so that your face scrunches up and you look like a shrivelled old hag." The Rani called up her hallway surveillance camera and saw the cretin pulling sour faces at it. What nerve!

"If you think--"

"_I_ think you're completely ungrateful for the opportunity that I've afforded to you here," the cretin snarled, baring his teeth. "How is it you've not figured out how to stabilize bad regenerations yet? Have you gone senile? Sixty-seven fucking times!"

The Rani hastily called up the ventilation protocols on her console. A cold, foreboding weight had settled in her belly.

"Who are you? High Council? Did the Lord President order you to engineer this, so I'd make better progress?"

"God, and you would not believe how _boring_ it's been, eating the same thing day after day, killing the same people over and over. I already _did_ that once. And this time there's not even _television_," the cretin rambled on, as though the Rani hadn't said a word. "Maybe you just need some motivation, since you fucked up so badly the first time you tried this, when you made those Never Weres. I'll have you know that I am a very inspirational speaker."

He did something with his hands -- the Rani couldn't see what -- which sent a good thousand volts worth of something-or-other through her door lock. The Rani knew she shouldn't be afraid. If she died at this intruder's hands, she'd come back with the next cycle; yet her pride would not allow her to sacrifice herself for answers.

Colossal fuck-up indeed. Bad enough that she had this sorry place, these ugly scars.

"Go to hell!" The Rani shrieked, and jammed her hand down on the switch that would flood her base with a selective neurotoxin.

The energy bolt sputtered off, and was replaced by a gagging, gurgle-gasp sound. To the Rani, the vapour drifted up through the lab's ventilation shafts smelled faintly of strawberries. To those who were not so fortunate as to share her genetic code, it smelled like blood, and phlegm, and coughing up the lining of their lungs.

The Rani kicked at her makeshift bedroll in a fit of pique. Fat chance she had of getting to sleep _now_.


	3. Chapter 3

_...:cycle sixty-eight:._

The Rani crouched by a potted plant, and hastily pressed loose soil around her datapad-turned-radscanner. The device wasn't anything to publish about. If a supplier had tried to sell it to her, she would have laughed him out of the star system. But the Rani was determined to be well-informed about at least one aspect of this gruesome farce, and with little pain and a lot of luck, this sorry excuse for a sensor might just help her identify her tormentor's strange energy weapon. Searching his corpse had proven less than productive.

Not that the Rani'd had much else on her schedule.

Once the radscanner was sufficiently concealed, the Rani rose and brushed the dirt from her hands. Rubbed a smudge off her wrist. Checked for hypothetical specks of grit beneath her fingernails. Her landing foyer was equipped with a large observation window, and outside it, far beyond helping, lay the empty ruins of Atelier Mutandis. The Rani know that the view wasn't anything worth looking at. All of her subjects, so painstakingly crafted, were little more than quantum detritus now; their finely-woven genetic codes had been scattered to the edges of the vortex.

The Rani shoved her hands into her pockets. Thankfully, Captain Pyrrho's TARDIS arrived in time to rescue her from an unseemly bout of introspection.

"Captain Pyrrho. As expected."

The Rani pivoted on the point of her heel, putting the time-ravaged landscape firmly behind her. She did not blink twice at the coatstand TARDIS with its supradimensional flourishes of cloth. The scene was a familiar one: pale yellow light, a portal of woven wire, and a half-dozen hardened young things carrying dematerialization guns.

Captain Pyrrho and his lantern jaw gawked out from the ship's interior. The Rani glared past him at the shadows who guarded his flank.

"Milady?" Captain Pyrrho said. "Were you expecting us? Command said that advance messages were impossible in the-"

"What in hell's name do you think you're doing?" The Rani interrupted.

Rage felt like the handle of her electro-magnetic scalpel, cold where it dug into the flesh of her palm.

"Our orders are to bring you-"

"Oh, do shut up. Little boys should be seen and not be heard." The Rani slid the scalpel out from her pocket, and pointed it straight at the TARDIS door. "Listen here: you'll not run me like a rat on an exercise wheel, until I spin right out of my wits! Name your terms plainly, or you'll get your data over my dead body."

The only way to get a read on that energy weapon was to provoke its wielder into using it.

"That was entirely uncalled for." Captain Pyrrho frowned. "We're only trying to-"

"I said _shut up_, you minor genetic by-blow," the Rani said.

She squinted into the light and tried to make out which silhouette belonged to her target. The Rani didn't like to waste time crying over spilled blood cultures, but she supposed it was a pity that all of her experiments were gone. Not because of the lost samples -- in truth, the fresh start had been good for her, after so many centuries spent trying to build wonders atop the same rickety biological foundations -- but because she could have used a half-dozen hunter-killer hummingbirds right now.

As it was, conditions were not exactly optimal. Captain Pyrrho had apparently decided to block her line of sight by placing his hands on his hips and throwing a strop. "Milady Rani! May I remind you that we are here under the express orders of the High Council!"

The Rani ignored him. "Are you hiding? Did my toxin hurt that much? I assure you that I'm prepared to repeat that little experiment, if you persist in this foolish endeavour."

With that, the Rani snapped her wrist back, and set her scalpel blade to sparking with an ominous mauve light. In hindsight, it wasn't a terribly effective first salvo. Her hope had been that the crew would rush out to restrain her. Instead, someone shot her scalpel right out of her hands, firing a bolt that seared across her knuckles and straight through her left lung.

The Rani crumpled to the floor. Her wound was agonizing, of course. Hot liquid gushed down her chest and hard tile cracked against the back of her head.

"She was trying to break through the TARDIS' security barrier!" The Rani heard her opponent exclaim, beneath the roar of blood. "I saw it! You all saw it, didn't you? That madwoman could have been out to kill us all, sir."

"Yes. We all saw, soldier," Captain Pyrrho said. "And we've all had a lot wear on our nerves these past few weeks. Don't worry: I'll make the situation clear in my incident report. You did the right thing. You're among friends."

What rubbish. They must be having a _moment_. "T- thank you sir. The Prydonians won't even visit her. You know what the Lord Doctor's men say."

"And Prydonia her own college, to boot. We should go and report on this. I didn't like the idea of leaving the Cadet here in the first place."

A scuffling noise, and oh my, the ceiling tiles were starting to blur together, how interesting.

"Please, sir. Let me check to make sure she'll regenerate; to make sure that this isn't a suicide by soldier. It would make me feel _ever_ so much better about wounding one of our own, and the Commander will want to know if she yet lives."

"If you care to volunteer."

A scruffy, ash-blonde soldier moved into her field of vision. She saw his boots, and then his cloak, and then his beady brown eyes, until he finally drew close close enough to kneel down beside her.

"Well, I hope you're happy," the soldier griped, in a low voice. "You've _ruined_ gas for me. Why is it that I never get to have nice things?"

The Rani made an indignant gurgling sound. For some reason, this prompted the soldier to start cradling her body as though she were a wounded, skittish pet.

"Don't be that way. I know how you love to spew bile but this is neither the time nor the place." The soldier gave her shoulder a caring little pat. Then he slid his hand up her collarbone, angled the heel of his palm just-so, and crushed her windpipe with a fast, efficient jab. The Rani might have done the same, in his position. Her respiratory bypass was still active, but this way there would be no inconvenient whimpering while she bled to death. "You've no idea how lucky you are, to be easily the least appetizing person I have ever met."

The soldier cradled the Rani's head in his lap and smiled beatifically down at her. All for the benefit of their audience, of course. If this moron laid it on any thicker they'd start recreating Michelangelo's Pieta any moment now.

Blackness pooled behind her eyes. Her mouth tasted like fresh blood, vital and hot.

"I don't know what you hoped to accomplish with that stupid display, and oh wait, _I don't care_. My Lady Rani, please attend carefully," the soldier said, in a knowing murmur. "The sooner you obey and make progress, the sooner all of this can stop."

The soldier brushed the hair back out of her eyes, and laid her carefully back own on the floor, before standing and heading back towards the rest of his crew. He was saying something to Captain Pyrrho. It sounded important, and the Rani supposed that she should care, but her mind was growing gauzy with death, her blood was slowing as it pooled all around her, and the only thing that cut through the fog was a sudden, sharp shock of recognition.

_Please attend carefully._

That sneak! That rat! That cretin! That cad! That venal, juvenile, cowardly, insufferable little bastard! This was the absolute end of days, and still, _still_, the Rani could not finish a course of experimentation in peace without the Master barging in to botch things up!! Everything was done, everything was _gone_, and he couldn't allow her one single success before she died to make up for all the work she'd lost, oh no, he just _had_ to be selfish-bloody-Koschei, and she could hear him leaving, and she was going to, she had to, if she could just move she would--

Be so angry that she forgot to stop herself.

Until she shuddered.

Faded.

Ended.

And began again.

Gold, and gold, and more gold still; molten potential bubbling up from beneath her synapses. A single moment that transcended linear time, superimposing I-who-am and I-who-was and I-who-must-be, giving birth to a whole fleet of barely-used Gallifreyan tenses that had no hope of capturing the sum totality of a Time Lord's transtemporal soul. Her self went on forever, and oh, it was so terrible.

Then the Rani felt herself breathing, the world lurched back into place, and she was the shell once more. Her clothing cut into her shoulders and corset had burst straight off. This frame of hers was so large. She didn't think she'd been this large before.

The Rani kicked off her shoes and shuffled over to the window in her knees. She didn't want to stand up and tower over everything else in the room.

"This happened-- why, so I could kick his scrawny arse?" the Rani muttered brokenly. "Time will reset before then. What a goddamn joke."

Dark hair flopped down in front of the Rani's eyes. She pushed it back behind her ear so as to better take in the tableaux outside. She missed busy, didn't she? She liked busy, so long as it was easily shut out with a flick of her blinds. She could still see it in her mind's eye. Modified raccoon-goat hybrids crept between public garbage containers, devouring all the waste. A child from the food-production caste skipped backwards from the docks, flicking droplets of water from her thick, amphibious, insulated skin. Oh, the Rani had been so very proud of that adaptation. Miasimia Goria was a world without exiles. All of her people were exquisitely useful. Every genome had its place.

This particular Rani had only a few mayfly hours before the time loop kicked in and she was back to cold and crumbling. She ought to take advantage of the situation. New life meant new ideas, and if she found a datapad she could surely write some down.

"It's my fault. It's all my fault. S- stupid--"

The Rani pounded ineffectually at the glass, and did not make any attempt to control her sobbing.

++

 

_...:cycle sixty-nine:._

The Rani had never nurtured an interest in divinitory technology. When she was young, it had seemed inconcievable that she could ever abandon the sublime architecture of the universe for the murky flow of maybe-someday. The calculus of destiny was an unforgiveably soft science, and its inferiority was evident in the fates of its practitioners; visionaries who paid for their betrayal of the intellect by devolving into incoherent old bats with bad tattoos. She could have happily lived out thirteen accomplished lives without ever gleaning the slightest understanding of those dreadful hags.

But it was too late now. The Rani had seen the future -- had _been_ the future -- and it was more hideous than any mere statistical outlier. All of her carefully-constructed rationalizations were nothing more than sandcastles in the tide.

"The regeneration was a low blow, you worm," the Rani used used her scalpel to overload the light above them. It exploded outward, raining shards of glass down on the Master's head.

The Master hissed, rubbed the blood out of his eyes, and continued stalking her down the hallway. "Come on. You _know_ I owed you  
one."

And the awful part was that the Rani did know. She knew why he'd wanted retribution for marring whatever brief joy he got out of gassing people to death. She understood the appeal of taking solace in madness and violence, when one had nothing else left to look forward to. Thanks to this war, her next regeneration was liable to be a disgusting, damaged, useless emotional trainwreck who had no right to carry on the legacy of a distinguished scientist. And yet that prospect was _still_ less disturbing than the fact that the Master now made some small amount of logical sense.

It was a good thing that luring Captain Pyrrho's team out of their TARDIS and assaulting the Master in a dark hallway was a completely legitimate part of her energy weapon investigation. Otherwise the Rani might have an existential crisis on her hands.

The Rani backed away, slowly, and flicked through the settings on her scalpel as subtly as possible. It wouldn't be long until the Master had her backed into a dead end. The certainly had made him overconfident.

"Honestly. With--" she struggled for an appropriate term, "-- _associates_ like you, who needs enemies?"

"Associates, you say?" The Master fired a warning shot, which carved a long, painful scratch along her left cheek. Toying with her. He'd never gotten over that nonsense with the cats. "Oh, Rani, did you make a friend other than me? I thought we went over the part where your vibrator doesn't count. Neither does the slime mould in your desk drawer."

"And you're one to talk."

The Master pouted. "People like me! People _always_ like me. I have a compelling personality, and I throw incredible parties. You should hear about the time I was Prime Minister of Great Britain."

"It's always something to prove with you." The Rani shook her head.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm the Rani. I don't need to prove anything. _I_ was born better."

She raised her scalpel to the sky and pulled it sharply downward, tearing the light fixtures right out of the ceiling. Steel buckled and twisted and faltered, bringing a hundred pounds of metal right down on the Master's head. He made the strangest squawking noise when the back of his skull split open like an overripe grapefruit.

"Ha." The Rani kicked the Master's body in the ribs for good measure, before heading off to turn the poison gas back on. She didn't need any other pests poking around while she tried to get some work done.

++

 

_...:cycle seventy-eight:._

Once the Rani worked her anger out, she was relieved to discover that deathmatches with the Master were more tedious than his long history with the Doctor would suggest. The first couple of victories had been satisfying, and she could deal with being murdered herself, so long as she remembered not to regenerated, but the whole process was so pointless. The Master -- never satisfied unless he was striving towards new heights in obnoxiousness -- had apparently decided that he was too much of an artist to kill her with something as mundane as a giant energy bolt.

The Rani took a good look at the diamond-tipped chainsaw that the Master had built out of her old dentistry set, and parked her hands on her hips. She couldn't see why he looked so gleeful about slashing up her walls. "For heaven's sake. Why don't you go bother the Doctor!?"

"The Doctor would have figured that out by now. He would also be too ladylike to stab me through the eye," the Master said. He shot the Rani a pointed look, which she ignored, and then twisted his face into a crude expression, which she could only hope to one day wipe from her brain through the application of advanced narcotics. "It's so adorable when he pretends to have scruples. You just want to hold him and squeeze him until he starts turning purple and losing higher cognitive function. And this one you've got here, with the cravats, I bet he'd love it if I ch--"

The Rani recalled why she avoided starting conversations about the Doctor. She moved to quickly change the subject.

"So, is that what this latest incarnation of yours is trying to pass off as a beard?"

The Master pulled a face, clapped his hands together, and proceeded to shove several thousand chronovolts straight down her throat.

The Rani glanced at the radscanner she'd stuck to the wall, and allowed herself a pained smile of triumph.

++

 

_...:cycle seventy-nine:._

For the first time in ten cycles, the Rani stood in her landing foyer and waited for Captain Pyrrho's TARDIS to join her. It made for a refreshing change from hiding in supply closets and waiting for the Master to come try to kill her. She had a weapon, and she had an answer, and so long as she refused to think about anything else that was going on, she was capable of acting in a calm and productive manner.

And if the look in her eyes was a little feverish, well. At least she was alert.

The door to the coatstand TARDIS shimmered open, and the Rani made a point of clasping her hands behind her back. Her posture was strong and solid. She'd even bothered to re-lace her corset. Time kept putting her back together, so it made no difference if her old schoolmate could still see the cracks.

"You're falling apart," she said, before Captain Pyrrho could get a word in edgewise. It must be difficult to lead such an irrelevant life.

Baffled silence press downed on them, until it finally forced an answer out of her old schoolmate.

"I know."

Ah, there the Master was -- two back from Pyrrho, slanted slightly to the left, shaded behind the curve of one of the TARDIS' support arches.

"Was that so hard?" The Rani didn't wait for a reply. "Idiot. Come now. Let's talk about this like grown-up Lords and Ladies, if you're capable of sitting still without stabbing something for more than five minutes at a time."

Their eyes met, the Rani set her scalpel humming, and the Master chose to ruin the moment by treating her to an exaggerated wink. She was about to make a scathing retort when Captain Pyrrho shouted something inane and the Master began zapping startled young soldiers into her striking range. Together they made short work of the very unfortunately landing-party -- the Rani quietly eviscerating the children with her surgical tool, while lashed out with his fists and drove some poor child's nose back into her grey matter. She counted herself fortunate that he wasn't resorting to even more primitive methods. Their little contest had furnished the Rani with the knowledge that this particular Master was not above hair-pulling when it suited him.

By the time their brutal work was finished, they were both breathing hard and surrounded by corpses. The Rani did not try to push past the Master and into Captain Pyrrho's TARDIS. It was standard operating procedure for these teams to install force shields that barred unauthorized personnel from the interior, and the Master, being the Master, would have already programmed it not to respond to anyone bearing her immutable genetic base code.

"I'm going to go get a sedative," the Rani said. "Something to keep them from regenerating. Try not to blow us up while I'm gone."

"Somehow I _do_ manage," the Master assured her. Except she didn't feel reassured at all when she returned to discover one of the corpses looking more mangled that it had when she left.

"Were you gnawing on that boy?" The Rani grimaced.

The Master shrugged. Tilted his head. Noticed the blood covering his left hand, and brought his palm to his face so that he could lap it up.

The Rani started her round of injections. It was only practical to get to work right away, and if that served as an excuse not to look at the Master grooming himself, then she couldn't be accused of getting squeamish.

"What happened to you, out there?"

"Oh, you know." The Master swept his arms up in an exaggerated shrug. "Killed a bit, died a bit, stared down the end of the universe. The usual."

Ugh. Was he-- ? Yes. Yes he was. He was making disgusting little smacking noises as he cleaned off each finger. The hooligan had all the manners of an alley cat, not to mention the terrible hygiene.

"What happened to you?" The Rani pressed. "I'm aware that biology isn't your area of interest -- _that_ would be amateur theatre -- but you should be fully capable of conducting your own investigations into the Gallifreyan regenerative process. And all this. This crude trap you've sprung. This isn't you. You like to pretend to be civilized. You should be posing as an ambassador for His Concurrent Majesty, offering me all the laboratories of Hypothetical Bastion and then poisoning my wine over dinner. You should be composing some awful speech and--"

The Master's hands glowed golden, and his expression crackled with a strange intensity. "I changed," he grated out. "Because I had to. You have to change if you want to leave this place. You've got to leave yourself behind."

And for the first time, the Rani considered that maybe he _couldn't_ do the work. That the topic he was so desperately avoiding was the physical deterioration of his own capacity for prolonged research. The Master needed her to figure out how to fix him because his appetites would not allow him to do the work on his own. His intellect was a slave to his condition.

Oh, poor Koschei. Reckless, stupid, idiot boy.

The Rani wasn't sure what pity looked like on her face. The expression probably fell fairly close to horror.

"Oh, really?" She snapped her jaw shut. "To me you seem as adolescent as ever."

The Master stacked two of the bodies on top of one another and sat himself down on his brand new cushion. The Rani quickly finished her remaining ministrations.

"There's no point, you know. Not to ruling a kingdom, or summoning power, or winning a consort, or starting a lovely war. Not to your pathetic little projects either. It's all nothing." He looked out at the empty harbour. "You've seen it out there. You know I'm right." He smiled to himself -- a resigned, distant thing, that was far beyond the Rani's experience of the Master's dramatics. "Reality is fleeting and chaotic. The only truth is ruin. The only real means of control is destruction."

The Rani crouched down beside him.

"If that's what you believe, then why are you so hell-bent on all this? We could both go while we still have our dignity."

"Do your work, Rani." The Master closed his eyes. Breathed in. Stood up. "Give me what I want -- give me a stabilization process -- and you won't keep cycling back. I'll send you to your rest with your mind intact; I promise. Do you understand what I'm offering, here? I'm giving you the chance not to die a failure. Your work will be remembered in the glory of my flesh. I won't even gnaw on your bones, you stringy old cow."

The Rani stayed in place.

"Do you think this means you've won?"

The Master walked back up to the TARDIS. "You want to know a secret?" He said, from just within the doorframe. "Winning is so boring. You have _no_ idea."

The Rani remained still long after the TARDIS' afterimage had faded.

+++

_...:cycle eighty:._

Awareness began where it always did -- with the Rani's console chair digging into her tailbone, and an eyestrain headache brewing around her ocular nerves. The Rani brought her fingers to the circular keypad and enjoyed familiar feeling of rounded plastic buttons against the tips of her nails. She had using the same basic input setup for most of her adult life. So long as she had the basic equipment to generate circular iconographic script, she could make any barbaric environment into a passable excuse for home.

There was no hurry to grab up her weapon, this cycle. She couldn't stop the recurrence loop, but she knew how to buy herself some breathing space, and she was free to enjoy the little things so long as she didn't think too hard about the communications portal she was about to ring up.

A window opened on her main datascreen, scrolling three-dimensional encryption algorithms in a semi-randomized order. She spent a furious two minutes decoding the keypass, then let her hands rest as the numbers resolved into a highly saturated image. The audiovisual feed showed a command deck that might have belonged to a TARDIS in another life, but for the hanging blood vessels and exposed bone.

This, then, was the interior of a Meanwhile.

The Rani endured a great deal of excited shouting and scuffling about, until someone finally deigned to address her over the comm.

"Yes! Hi! Hello!" A man exclaimed. His uniform robes had been torn and braided into a sort of rough, wild tunic, and his eyes glowed a highly familiar shade of amber. He was a potential regeneration that had never happened, made manifest through the warp and weft of time -- the broken echo of a Time Lord's artron core. "The Could-Have-Been King will be very pleased to know that you've decided to stop ignoring our messages!"

"You. You're a Neverwere."

The Rani's hands clenched beneath the desk. Her dreadful temporary self had been right about one thing, and one thing only: all of this destruction really _was_ her fault. If her first regeneration experiments had been more stable--

But she'd been overconfident about what she could accomplish, once she was finally reunited with up-to-date Time Lord technology. She had wanted those fools who had exiled her to be impressed with her progress and regret their narrow-mindedness.

"Well, yes. You know that." The Neverwere beamed.

"A military TARDIS heading towards these temporo-spatial coordinates. It carries a man who is a significant threat to my safety, and a dying girl whom I require for the continuance of my experiments," the Rani said. "I want you to intercept that TARDIS before it can land, and bring the specimen to me. Will you do this?"

The Neverwere flashed her a mock salute. So very un-Gallifreyan of him.

"Of course. We're under standing orders to give you whatever you need for your research, Mother."


	4. Chapter 4

_...:cycle eighty-five:._

Waiting for the Neverweres to arrive was fairly different from waiting for the Master and Captain Pyrrho. For one thing, the Neverweres tended to arrive later, so the Rani was free to brew herself a weak cup of stimulant fumes before she showed up in the landing foyer. For another, with the Master off her guest list, there was no need for her to squander valuable time speculating as to how she'd make it through the next few hours without being burned, shocked, frozen, stabbed, slashed, poisoned, or perforated. All told it was a real step up in terms of working conditions. And the Rani wasn't going to pretend that her starved psyche wasn't lapping up the novelty.

It was almost a pity that the Neverweres were freaks, failures, evolutionary dead-ends, and bona fide psychic abominations.

Almost.

Yet the Rani had never felt any excessive attachment towards her Time Lord offspring, once the chromosomes were stabilized and the developmental studies were written, and _this_ lot was even less appealing than the pair of plodders she'd spawned when she was still young and foolishly preoccupied with the recombinant potential of her genetic code. The Rani was not disposed to broaden her affections now.

"Come now, children," she muttered to herself, inspecting her long, chipped nails. "Hurry up."

And hurry they did. With the shuddering sound of an algae bloom oozing down a sewer pipe.

Proper TARDISes were mannered creatures, bred and raised by a mannered society. They hid their sentience behind the polite fiction of push-button consoles and wheezing bellows. But Meanwhiles weren't proper TARDISes, and they weren't capable of conducting themselves as such. The one which visited the Rani manifested first as an oily patch in the shadows, then gasped itself larger, larger, larger, throwing out slimy tendrils to anchor itself to the wall, until the Rani found herself looking at a quivering, tentacled mass of flesh, with milky recessed eyes and a tenebrous gaping maw.

The maw opened to rudely vomit forth her visitors. The Rani wasn't sure if their singed and skimpy robes were a fashion statement, or if the rags were simply all they had left after doing battle with the Master. She merely wished that they wouldn't walk barefoot on her nice sterile floor.

"Hullo!" One of them burbled.

"Oh, wooooow." The other enthused, craning her neck about to take in the view. "Yes! Good morning, Moth- um, Ma'am! We're here! Like you asked!"

"Are you going to make a weapon?"

"Are you making more of us?"

"Sometimes we appear on our own."

"Most times."

"But there's always room for improvement."

"His Concurrent Majesty _is_ building an army."

"I always wanted a sister!"

They held a rusted gurney between them, which bore the unconscious body of Subject Four-Beta. The Rani gave the girl a once-over and was pleased to see that she remained largely intact, aside from her terminal crush injury. The Neverweres could heal their own wounds within minutes, like any brand-new regeneration, and they did not seem to have a solid understanding of what physical damage meant to most beings. Last time they'd delivered Subject Four-Beta minus her left arm, which was no good at all when the Rani was trying to maintain controlled experimental conditions.

The Rani suppressed a full-body shudder -- no small accomplishment -- and dove into the task of berating the new arrivals with an almost feverish gusto.

"And just what do you think you're celebrating?" The Rani said. "Get over of here, you imbeciles, before your temporal displacement fields disrupt my instruments! I don't care whose territory this is, or what exactly your ruler thinks I've authorized. I've not invited you here to sightsee."

"Sorry! Sorry." They pushed the gurney towards her.

The taller of the two pulled a stern, pompous face that did nothing to hide the spark of happiness in her eyes. It reminded the Rani of her old Castellan impression. That regeneration had been disappointingly flighty, between the abortive attempts at a sense of humour and the pedestrian predilection for leather catsuits.

"Delivery for you, ma'am," the Neverwere said.

"I can see that."

Hmph. _Ma'am_ indeed. Less disturbing than 'Mother', but an irritant nonetheless. The honorific was evidence that the Could-Have-Been King held her in some estimation, in spite of -- no, _because_ of -- her history as a renegade who took an unseemly interest in the status of lower species. The Rani had yet to determine which of her two like-minded schoolmates must have spawned him. She was not inclined to plan a research expedition to the Hypothetical Bastion, for the sole purpose of checking whether its monarch sported tacky facial hair.

"See? Told you we'd get you to the lab." The taller Neverwere patted Subject Four-Beta on the cheek, her motions evidencing no small amount of affection. The Rani could understand why. This Neverwere was an identical twin to the manic, poetry-minded regeneration that Subject Four-Beta had produced dozens of cycles earlier. "I'm glad I got to rescue us. Maybe some of your reality rubbed off on me. My Captain thinks that you're so cute, he could just break you into little bitty bits of burnt-up bone." She took a moment to sigh dreamily, for some unfathomable reason. Then her lips thinned. "You had better not sleep with yours. You had _better not_. Because if it happens for real, that makes it so much harder for us."

Her partner was content to stand still and gawp. Happy happy, hollow hollow, with the light shining through her eyes from the back of her skull. Not everyone had a strong enough personality to produce Neverweres capable of multi-dimensional thought.

The Rani cleared her throat. "Your efforts are duly acknowledged."

It was a dismissal, and thankfully, the two Neverweres both recognized as much. They shuffled off with a series of half-bows and pleased noises, like a pair of schoolgirls gushing over their first meeting with a dissertation advisor. It was quite fortunate that none of the Neverweres appeared to remember the time loop they were stuck in.

"See you later, me! Watch out for the monster!"

Watch out for the monster. Ha. The Master would get a kick out of that one. The Rani resolved to tell him about it when he was too annoyed to properly appreciate it.

The Rani wheeled Subject Four-Beta into an exam room and began weaving her into the intravenous injection system, hovering over the husk of the girl's body like a great fat mother spider.

+++

_.:cycle eighty-six:._

"Cadet Ataraxia of the Arcalian Fleet, I welcome you to the medical facilities of Miasimia Goria."

It had been a relief to find that the script still came easily to her lips, after all that back-and-forth with the Master. The cycles were beginning to blur together, and she could feel her memory failing, with test results stumbling and crashing together. All the mental exercises in the world couldn't divine meaning from twisted scrap.

"Be assured that you are relatively secure here," the Rani continued, adjusting the lights above Subject Four-Beta's bed. "This complex lies within the allied temporal-spatial territory of the Could-Have-Been King. You were dropped you off here after your lower half was crushed by a fallen support beam." She stuffed her spare hand in her coat pocket, where her fingers could stroke the handle of her scalpel without drawing any undue attention. "You've been classified as Subject Four-Beta for the purposes of my medical database. I am the Rani. I will be personally supervising your regeneration process."

"They what? They sent me to _the R_-" Subject Four-Beta bit back whatever it was that she'd been about to say. "I mean." Her cheeks coloured, and she stared down at her ruined knees.

The Rani arched an eyebrow.

"You mean what?" The scalpel handle had grown warm with her body heat.

"If I tell you, you're going to think I've gone mad."

The Rani laughed in spite of herself. "We've all gone mad by now, Cadet. Initial physical recovery is proceeding as normal. Do you have any ongoing adverse reactions to report? Any physiological outliers I should be aware of?"

Subject Four-Beta looked like she wished she could bury her face in her blankets. Like an ostrich. Spectacularly useless animals, ostriches. The Rani did not approve of quirky species-specific adaptations. They made evolution look frivolous.

"I asked you a question, Cadet," the Rani said.

"I feel almost like I've been here before," Subject Four-Beta said. Her hands knotted miserably in the fabric of her blanket. "I know how that sounds! I know! Deja vu is the means by which primitive species process psychic backwash, and I'm not a primitive creature, so obviously it's all wrong. I don't know what to do." She sniffed back tears. "It's only a feeling. It's not proper."

Silence ticked by, and the Rani supposed that she was obliged to produce some sort of reply. "Ah. Well. Yes. Don't dwell on irrelevancies," she said.

This did not have the quieting effect that the Rani had hoped for.

"Did my Captain bring me here? There were- _things_," Subject Four-Beta faltered. She looked up at the Rani with big watery eyes. "You're so old. And you're so calm. I wish I could be calm. I don't think I'll live to be that old."

"This will be your first regeneration," the Rani said, by way of not answering.

Subject Four-Beta nodded, and the Rani already knew where this was headed. Four tremulous words.

"Will it hurt, Milady?"

A ridiculous question -- one that become exponentially more annoying, when the Rani recalled her own recent experience of regenerating into a weeping wreck. Yes, of course it would hurt. _Everything_ hurt. The Rani had died a dozen times within the past few relative days, and even that was only a drop in the ocean. This was no safe, soaring Citadel, with all the rough corners of the universe sanded off. Pain was where they were. It was who they had become. It was the place of their exile.

How many times would she need to explain it?

The Rani felt, in that moment, that she was never going home. Oh, she'd known it before -- had known it for centuries. But now she _understood_.

The Rani thought about the base chemicals of despair and the neurotransmitters of sorrow. She thought about clinical depression and artificial seratonin highs and the biofeedback techniques of fifth-level Gajavian aero-monks. She thought about the drugs in her lab which she hadn't tried out yet, and the drugs of her youth which she'd designed to fund extra-credit projects, and the drugs she'd need to take, in order to make the Master and the time loop and this whole bloody war disappear into the recesses of her awareness.

And then she had an idea.

"What if it didn't?" the Rani said, slowly, feeling out the texture of the idea with the tip of her tongue.

Subject Four-Beta looked as surprised as the Rani felt.

"What do you mean?" she said, pathetic in her eagerness. Which was fair enough, considering the mass of cracked bone that had once been her pelvis.

"What if it didn't hurt? What if you didn't feel any pain? Wouldn't that give you a fresh start for your new regeneration?"

"Is that possible?" Subject Four-Beta loosened her grip on the sheets.

"I didn't ask you what was possible," the Rani said. She drew her scalpel from her pocket, and absently flicked through the settings. "You're hardly qualified to offer an opinion."

Subject Four-Beta closed her fingers around the Rani's right wrist.

"Please." She tugged at the Rani's arm. Her pelvis made a squelching noise when she shifted her weight. "I don't want to be scared anymore."

Living beings were meant to experience pain, the Rani knew. Pain was nature's warning system. Even the stupidest beast could understand pain and improve its lot through the avoidance thereof. Emotional pain was as necessary to the psyche as basic REM sleep.

Toying with such fundamental neurological processes was sheer folly. She'd learned that lesson centuries ago, and it had cost her more of her dignity than she might have liked.

"I know what to do," the Rani said, and pried her wrist free.

++

_...:cycle eighty-nine:._

Subject Four-Beta's latest regeneration was unusually beautiful for a second body. She had a long neck, glossy hair, and perfect flat china-doll cheekbones. Her musculature was firm and supple, and the upper half of her torso appeared to be composed primarily of breasts, while the breadth of her hips spoke to an impolite level of fertility. This was the kind of body that would give a Time Lady trouble finding sexual partners; young people of the Citadel thought it gauche to show a predilection for traditional biological attractors.

Superficial dolts.

The Rani credited herself for the aesthetic improvement. Many an inexperienced Time Lady had botched up her second body by trying too hard for a specific physical ideal; yet Subject Four-Beta had been so thoroughly occupied by the Rani's experimental sedative that the thought hadn't entered her pretty little head.

"That will be the end of trial two. You may exhale."

"Mmm."

It felt nice to credit herself with something, after so many failures. Even if it was something spectacularly banal. This was the Rani's cure. Her process was working. No trauma meant no fear and no fear meant no neurosis and no neurosis meant a regeneration that wasn't completely out of its mind. Something pure and untainted by the emotional fluctuation.

Now to work out the side-effect.

"Commencing trial three. Tell me how this one feels," the Rani said, holding a lighter to the pad of Subject Four-Beta's thumb. Subject Four-Beta stared dispassionately up at the ceiling while her skin blistered and burned.

"You're burning me," she said, after some time. Once the smell became pronounced enough. The clasps around her wrists prevented her from rolling onto her side.

The Rani set the lighter down on her tray, next to the vial of citric acid and the beaker of dry ice.

++

_...:cycle ninety-nine:._

"You don't love him anymore," the Rani preened, in her very best Master impression. "I've stolen that from you by means of psychic surgery. I am a bad, nasty woman. Ha."

Only she wasn't all that good at impressions in this incarnation, and the threatening leer fell as flat as her previous attempts at a megalomaniacal chuckling.

Subject Four-Beta's wrist clasps -- long unfastened -- glittered dully beneath the fluorescent tract lighting. The Rani kept her scalpel in hand out of habit more than anything else. The new and improved Subject Four-Beta wouldn't so much as look at her, let alone make a grab for any impromptu weapons.

"Except that doesn't bother you, because you're stable now. We've made progress. Nothing's wrong with your brain -- I've checked. No regeneration scarring at all. You should be as functional as a Time Tot."

Subject Four-Beta continued her statistical survey of the ceiling tiles.

"So get up and make yourself useful!" the Rani snapped.

She didn't like to think of herself as pleading.

++

 

_...:cycle one hundred and fourteen:._

"Come on!" The Rani roared, slapping Subject Four-Beta full across the face.

In another context, they might have made for quite the kinky tableaux: the slim young experimental subject strapped down to her medical bed, and the wild-haired researcher who straddled her hips, punishing her for failing to produce the correct results. That sort of pornography had been startlingly popular on Miasimia Goria. The Rani had always taken it as a misguided compliment from the control populace.

This context, however, was very far from sexual. The Rani had never been aroused by failure or titillated by frustration. She wanted what she wanted when she wanted it, and she was never pleased to see her experiments come to nothing. Not when she'd was so close. Not when this stupid child was her very last chance.

Subject Four-Beta's head snapped back against the pillow. A small hiss of discomfort escaped her lips.

"Why are you so upset?" she said. Her cheek had reddened with the beginnings of a bruise, and her skin was flecked with the Rani's spittle.

"I'm done." The Rani hauled her up by the collar. "I am _done_. My formula is fine. You're cured, you ungrateful little wretch!"

"Oh."

"Oh? _Oh_? I didn't cure you to be useless! I can't live that way. I won't allow it. I'd rather die! I'd rather let that cretin of a Master kill me, and that's so utterly degrading that I wish the accident had already finished me off! I hate this war! I hate it!! Everything's warped and nothing makes sense!"

The Rani realized, dimly, that she had been shaking Subject Four-Beta so violently that she'd bashed the girl's head repeatedly against the headboard. Blood matted her hair and pooled at the base of her neck.

"This is very peaceful." Subject Four-Beta reached up to pat the Rani's cheek. "Thank you for curing me."

Killing the Master had been cathartic, in its own way, and this whole cycle was an absolute wash, so the Rani didn't hesitate to electrify her scalpel and drive it into the lazy brat's throat.

+++

 

_...:cycle one hundred and fourteen plus n equals:._

The Rani crouched in the middle of her landing foyer and cut cold equations into the corrugated steel floor. The writing on the ceiling was already done with. She liked the flare of her electro-magnetic scalpel, burning spots into her retinas, and the way that metal peeled back into glyphs at her prompting. Let the Neverweres think that she was inscribing runes, or a circle of summoning, like some mad old mountain witch from their darkest fairy-tales. They'd get a kick out of that.

The Meanwhile rumbled up behind her, gushing through the ventilation shafts and spilling out all over her careful work. Its tendrils fixed on the curling letters 'til the creature had lashed and stretched itself into a tortured-looking spiral of pus and bone. My, my. It must miss being Gallifreyan as much as its passengers did.

The Rani shuffled back just far enough to avoid her skirts being stained wit inter dimensional glop. "You're taken your time today," she said.

One of its eyes opened to stare balefully at her hands. The other had been seared out of its socket, leaving behind a dark, jellied hollow.

"What, did the Master put up more of a fight than usual? I thought you lot had strength in numbers." Or that the Master was content to let them win, so long as she kept working on their mutual regeneration problem. Perhaps a bit of both.

A tendril lashed around the Rani's wrist, quick as a snake, and the Rani was subjected to a deafening psychic bellow, which scraped its way down the nerves of her arm and burrowed straight up into her cerebellum. Confusion and loss and pain and never whole too soft always longing someone had hurt--

The Rani hacked the tentacle off with her knife, and jumped back into the corner, her trusty blade at the ready.

"Let me see." She shuddered. "Or you'll lose the other eye too."

The Meanwhile wailed again -- this time physically -- and let its mouth drop open in a shower of blood. Light burst forth from behind its teeth, almost blinding, and the Rani raised her spare hand to her temple in a futile attempt to cut down the glare.

One blink, then two, before her eyes adjusted to the illumination, and brightness resolved into a human-shaped figure that was shuffling out to meet her.

"Oh, hello. We- I'm so glad I can meet you," said Subject Four-Beta's Neverwere. She might have been attempting to smile. It was hard to tell, when it looked as though her life-force was ready to burst right out of her skin, like the flesh were little more than an overripe fruit. "The real me can't."

"Now, hold on. What are you trying to--"

The Neverwere ignored both the Rani's protest and the Rani's weapon, stumbling out of the Meanwhile's gullet and straight into her arms. She was missing a section from the side of her head, but with all that light poring out of her wound, it was hard to tell if there had been any matter there in the first place. If the Rani reached in, she might root around inside the Neverwere's shell and find nothing at all.

"Mother." She nuzzled the side of the Rani's neck. She smelled like burnt flesh and ozone; like a mass of electrical burns.

"Yes." The Rani looked out the window.

"Mother, we protected you from the monster."

"I know."

The Meanwhile's breath brushed against the Rani's neck. It carried no heat or moisture, the way a living thing's should.

"He said: tantrums aren't your style," the Neverwere muttered, sagging. The Rani was forced to redistribute her weight, in order to hold the Neverwere up. "He said: I won't let you lobotomize me, you crazy bitch. He said: stop fucking around."

The Rani's blood froze.

"How would he know that?" She hissed.

Come to think of it, how had he known about _any_ of her progress, from within Captain Pyrrho's ship?

"Mmm, Ma'am, Mother-Ma'am, Mother-Mother, do you think Captain Pyrrho's alternates will like me without my head intact?"

"I said: how would he know?!"

The Rani took took the Neverwhere by her shoulders, and shook her once, twice, thrice, but it was already too late. Her eyes were closed, the light was dimming, and her body was dissolving into a golden slurry that slipped through the Rani's fingers and pooled viscously on the floor. The Meanwhile groaned one final, sorrowful groan, and moved to join its last pilot, melting into a substance that resembled coal tar.

The Rani ripped her wet jacket off, and tossed it into the growing puddle of biomass. She stripped herself out of her dress too, for good measure, and cut off her hair where the Neverwere had touched her dewy hands to it. Then she turned tail and ran like an Ice Warrior out of Sarn.

Five minutes later, her insteps smarted from dashing around in heels, and her breath came in harsh, laboured gasps. She'd dashed all the way to her labs-turned-holding-cells, where her other failed experiments were locked out of sight and mind.

"Turning _and_ returning," one said, by way of comment, as he scuttled behind his thick bolted door. "He is returning. Returning and turning us."

The Rani was still in her petticoats, but she felt as though she might as well have been naked. She leaned heavily against the chill concrete wall.

"You planted him this boy. He's how you know about all my results. You've got a transmitter in him. Or, more likely, a psychic hook." The words caught in her throat, and she couldn't summon up the desired level of outrage. "This is so petty, you know! Petty and _small_! Much like yourself."

Fuck, she wished the safety showers still worked.

"Well, I'm not done yet. So you know."

+++

_...:cycle one hundred and fourteen plus n plus one equals:._

The next cycle, the Rani called for her Neverweres as usual. No one came to visit for the whole cycle.

+++

_...:cycle one hundred and fourteen plus n plus two equals:._

Nor did anyone come when she didn't intervene at all.

+++

_...:cycle divide by zero:_

The Rani scratched her final chemical diagram into the thin layer of epidermis just above her extensor culpi ulnaris, on the smooth flesh of her inner forearm. The best way to remember was to carve the knowledge straight into her bones, her muscle, her blood, down and down as far as it could go, as close as she could manage to scrawling all over her DNA.

"This is the only trial I'll do on myself. It's the last time I'm trying. After this, I'll stay on the drugs until you're done," she told the prisoner, who had spent most of the morning rocking back and forth, with his nose pressed into his knees and his eyes screwed shut. They were kindred spirits, her and him. Which still did not mean that she was opening the cell door.

"It's the last time I'm trying," she repeated, a little louder. "Who knows - perhaps it will work on me, where it didn't on her. So you tell your Master that he'd better come and see if it worked out. If he still wants to know."

The prisoner thunked his forehead against the wall. Good enough.

The Rani picked up her syringe -- her favourite, the one she'd saved especially for Subject Four-Beta, back when Subject Four-Beta was still a good girl and ideal test specimen. If Subject Four-Beta had ever existed in the first place. The Rani was a bit hazy on that point; temporal philosophy was not her specialty at the best of times. The syringe existed, though, which was the important part, because it was full of nice blue fluid, which the Rani had spent several pleasant cycles jamming into the arteries nearest to her left heart.

Once the syringe was prepared, she fashioned a crude tourniquet from the laces of her corset, and wound them around her upper right arm, holding the cloth taut with her teeth. Then she plunged the syringe into her arm, right above the lacerations she'd just made with her scalpel.

Ah, rest.

"Do you remember, Master? You said that if we want to leave this place, we have to cut out a part of ourselves."

The cuts on her arm bled out, oh-so-slowly, until the darkness crept into the backs of her eyes, and she felt the gold welling up from somewhere deep in her breast, right between her hearts. The serum did its job well. She wasn't scared. It didn't hurt.

Except one small bit of feeling still fluttered in her belly, when all the darkness was numbed and gone. Strange. So strange. Was that where her process had gone wrong with Ataraxia?

"I don't want to die. I want go," the Rani murmured, or perhaps only thought.

The regeneration came on in all due course.


End file.
